Corpus Agentis
The field book to agent ecosystems
The field book to agent ecosystems
Design · Topologies

Event-driven

Sparse dormant field with active pulse epicentres.

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Event-driven agent topology diagram

An event-driven agent is organised around a message bus: work arrives as events, handlers react, and their outputs are published as new events for other handlers to consume. There is no linear script; the flow is whatever the events trigger, which decouples producers from consumers and lets each part scale independently. It is the shape behind automation platforms wiring many triggers to many actions. In anatomy terms the transport layer, the bus, is the spine.

In the anatomy

An event bus is the spine; handlers (scoped cores or effectors) subscribe and publish; no central orchestrator sequences them; the perimeter gates each handler's writes.

At a glance
PatternEvent-driven
State modeldurable
ExampleLindy, Zapier Agents
Common use cases
  • ·Automation platforms: trigger to action across apps (Zapier Agents, Lindy, Airtable AI, Coda AI).
  • ·Reactive back-office workflows.
  • ·Systems integrating many independent event sources.
Strengths
  • ·Decouples producers from consumers: parts scale independently.
  • ·Naturally asynchronous and resilient.
  • ·Add a new handler without touching the others.
  • ·Handles bursty, many-source workloads.
Weaknesses
  • ·The flow is implicit: the end-to-end path is hard to see.
  • ·Debugging across the bus is difficult.
  • ·Ordering and idempotency are real problems.
  • ·Cascading events can be hard to bound.
Agents using this pattern · 4
LindyZapier AgentsAirtable AICoda AI

Mapping classified by the Field Book from each agent's documented control flow.

Basis

Description, use cases and trade-offs: Field Book analysis, synthesised from established agent-architecture literature.

Verified against
https://www.confluent.io/blog/event-driven-multi-agent-systems/

The corpus does not rewrite vendor documentation. Where copy is quoted verbatim it is marked as such and attributed to its source.